KERALA'S DEVELOPMENT EXPERIENCE RANDOM COMMENTS 51 Having settled that matter I had to decide on a topic for this address. Not having done any work on Kerala, it was obvious that I would have to depend entirely on the work of others. I shall underline some of the issues already established, offer comments on some problems and raise a few questions about others. This is certainly a lazy man's only option, but I shall try to carry it out as effectively as I can! Two decades ago, perhaps even in the early 1980s, the pattern of development that Kerala was following was spoken of with great admiration (was there also a tinge of adulation in it?) not only by ardently patriotic Keralites, but also by international development agencies which are usually very reluctant to compliment anything other than what they consider to be success stories in their standard pattern of 'development* identified with high levels of growth and per capita income. Kerala's experience was very different. It had a low level of per capita income even by the very low Indian standard but in terms of specific indices of social or human development, such as life expectancy, birth and death rates, infant mortality rates, literacy levels, especially of the female population, its performance had to be rated very high both by standards of the developing countries and by global standards or even by standards of the developed countries. What came to be frequently referred to as the 'Kerala Model' in those days was, therefore, an enigma.2 Kerala became noted at that time for one more aspect of economic significance—its radical land reforms were hailed by several scholars, Indian and foreign, as a major success story.3 The optimism and euphoria of those days, it would appear, has given place to nagging doubts and serious concern in more recent years. A set of studies conducted in the late 1980s and published in 1990 had 'Kerala Economy at the Crossroads' as their common title4 reflecting an element of crisis. This crisis is noticed in two spheres, first in the fact that the rate of growth of State Domestic Product (SDP) has been stagnating, and that the growth rate of the commodity producing sectors in particular has been very low. The second, and perhaps more alarming reflection of the crisis is seen in the fiscal sphere, the growing inability of the state to continue to finance precisely those social aspects that had become the glory of Kerala. The facts themselves and the studies analysing different aspects of the problems are by now quite familiar and hence I do not propose to go into details.5 Briefly the situation is as follows: Analysing the performance of SDP over the period from 1962-63 to 1985-86 and dividing the period into two,1962-63 to 1974-75 and 1975-76 to 1985-86. K.P. Kannan shows that overall SDP showed a growth